Diving deeper into leveraging user needs to understand the audience, Mediahuis Noord in The Netherlands is expressing the importance of leaving behind a culture of a journalist-first approach to news.

Alwin Wubs, newsroom analyst for Mediahuis Noord, walked attendees of INMA’s recent Newsroom Transformation Town Hall through four levels of integration:

1. Changing the conversation

Changing the conversation in the newsroom was a first big step for Mediahuis Noord. Wubs said he remembers when he began working there, much of the conversation was driven by journalists who used phrases like, “I have an idea for a story and here’s how I'm going to tell it.”

“Slowly but surely we’ve transformed more into a situation where we’re being able to say not what do I want to tell but what does the audience want to hear,’” Wubs said.

He said he encourages questions like: What are the stories the audience is looking for? What are the ways we can help them understand the news events that are happening?

2. Understanding the audience in real time

Crucial to the success of user needs is realising that they’re not just labels. Wubs mentioned newsrooms that have assigned AI to determine what the label or tag is for the story. And while doing it that way can provide some valuable insights for a company, that’s not how Mediahuis Noord does it. 

“It’s far more effective when you make it a tool for journalists and really engrain in every journalistic discussion those user needs,” Wubs said.

Wubs said he wants news companies to ask what they’re trying to do for their users and how they can help them understand what’s happening. 

Another learning Mediahuis Noord found in its user needs journey is that naming conventions matter. They started out with four user needs and went up to six. They quickly realised newsroom teams weren’t understanding them so they went back and renamed their user needs. 

“We repurposed them, retrained our journalists, and saw that the new names connect much more with the audience,” Wubs said.

They also learned how crucial it is to create individual successes. When they applied these user needs, their journalists found that not only were their stories more successful, but one journalist in particular even said that he was writing better, more concise and precise stories. Using user needs as a tool for better journalism became part of the strategy.

“There’s not a journalist in the world who doesn’t want to be read, of course, so if you can make a case that user needs result in better stories that are read more, or that people read longer, that people subscribe to, you’ll see that they’ll be used more,” Wubs said.

It’s also a trusted way to engrain user data more in the newsroom by creating context for success.

“It’s not just ‘the editor put my story on the front page, but did the audience actually read my story’ that becomes the value,” Wubs said.

An example Wubs used that shows how important it is to adjust in real time was a story they did about a double murder in a small town. This was unusual for the town and people flocked to their Web site to read all about it. 

Mediahuis Noord expected to see a boost in traffic, which they did, but they didn't expect to see a drop in attention time. They had to figure out why people weren’t staying in the articles very long. They looked to solve the problem by using the framework of user needs. 

They had a lot of “update me” articles and “give me perspective” articles, but no “help me” articles about the story. They learned they weren’t helping the audience understand the news events, and they were giving them tidbits of the news everywhere. The correction they found success using was giving their audience one place to find all the news. 

They created a large article titled, “Here’s what we know about the murders.” 

“It was a free article, it had all the facts, we kept it updated, we posted it prominently, so this became the place to connect with this event,” Wubs said.

The team also used links to paid articles for those wanting to go more in-depth and read reactions from town leaders and others.

The results were that attention time went back to normal the very next day and they even saw an increase in subscriptions.

3. Influencing production

Now the team is bringing this concept to a larger scale and increasing production. At the beginning of the year, they started seeing a discrepancy between what the audience was wanting to read and what the newsroom was producing.

“So we have been focusing on aligning the user needs with our production,” Wubs said. “So we’re matching the audience's expectations with our production now.” 

Articles and views are lining up better as a result.

4. Optimising distribution

User needs are also now a part of Mediahuis Noord’s daily planning. They’re gaining important insights now such as “no one wants to read ‘connect me’ stories in the morning,” Wubs said. 

“So we’re not going to post them in the morning anymore. In fact, we’re not going to ask anyone to make a story for that moment. We know about 7 pm, that’s when those stories are being read a lot. So now, in our daily production schedule, we order a ‘connect me’ story for 7 pm so we always have the kind of story our audience wants.”

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